I don't know why you're using the past tense here, I was still trying to talk some sense into these people barely two days ago. It's hopeless at this point.
If you have 3 hours, there's a documentary you can watch, about a man who was sanctioned by the government to kill a lot of "communists" in 1960's Indonesia: The Act of Killing (available at e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TDeEObjR9Q ).
It's sort of understandable why the defenders of the genocide have to keep defending it. Stopping doing so today would mean admitting that until yesterday you've been defending utter inhumanity.
A review:
> Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing is a challenging documentary. It is not only difficult to watch, but it also probes into one of the most grotesque aspects of human nature: the capacity for self-delusion in the face of horrific atrocities. This isn’t a film about history, facts, or statistics; it’s about the memories of the men who killed, the stories they tell themselves, and how they continue to live with the horrors they’ve inflicted on others. The film’s power lies in its ability to take the viewer beyond a surface-level understanding of evil and into the psychological abyss of those who have committed atrocities—and seemingly moved on with their lives.
> Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth quoted military officials Thursday as saying, “We estimate that about 70,000 Gazans were killed in the war, not including the missing.” Kan 11, the country’s public broadcaster, attributed the information to the Coordinator of Government Affairs in the Territories (COGAT) and said there is now an effort to analyze how many of those killed were civilian or militant.
And the IDF ain't contesting it:
> “The IDF clarifies that the details published do not reflect official IDF data,” the spokesperson said. “Any publication or report on this matter will be released through official and orderly channels.” The spokesperson did not answer if the IDF held data about the number of Palestinians killed in Gaza or if such information would ever be released.
Hospitals may have been used for retaliation [0], but it is unclear how many & in what capacity (according to accepted conventions, using a hospital to treat wounded combatants wouldn't make it a valid military target, for example; but hiding weapons or personnel would).
A lot of that ambiguity would vanish if Israel did not have a habit of drastically overstating their case and quietly walking it back after they end up killing more journalists and toddlers than active combatants in hospital bombings. Also if reports didn't deliberately conflate 'armed man' with 'Hamas militant' and euphemize about the 'Hamas-run Interior Ministry' like that one does.
> Israeli forces dressed in doctors’ scrubs and women’s clothes have killed three Palestinian militants in an undercover operation in a hospital in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin.
> It is prohibited to kill, injure or capture an adversary by resort to perfidy… The following acts are examples of perfidy… The feigning of civilian, non-combatant status...
(Assassinating a paralyzed patient in a hospital is also not typically - ahem - kosher.)
It's not at all an uncommon scenario to have to deal with in war, especially asymmetrical conflicts.
IMO, Israel stepped very clearly over the line, repeatedly, in how they handled it, but the parent post is a pretty reasonable summary of the considerations.
> Article 8 of the Rome statute, which established the international criminal court (ICC) in The Hague, defines a long list of war crimes including “intentionally directing attacks against buildings dedicated to religion, education, art, science or charitable purposes, historic monuments, hospitals and places where the sick and wounded are collected”.
> But it makes an exception if the targets are “military objectives”. Philip-Gay said that “if a civilian hospital is used for acts harmful to the enemy, that is the legal term used”, the hospital can lose its protected status under international law and be considered a legitimate target. Nevertheless, if there is doubt as to whether a hospital is a military objective or being used for acts harmful to the enemy, the presumption, under international humanitarian law, is that it is not.
Again, I think Israel committed war crimes here and throughout Gaza. But the parent poster has a point that using a hospital for combat purposes risks its status.
(There are still rules to follow in that case, that weren't followed. Again, war crimes.)
> Truth: Mass-destroying a country's hospitals, murdering the doctors, nurses, workers & patients, mass-executing aid workers ... is Israeli. And only Israeli.
This is the same mistake many made about Nazi Germany; convincing themselves that the Germans were uniquely evil. It stops people from having to examine themselves.
Steven Sinofsky (ex Microsoft, and was also in the Epstein leaks), has been running cover for the IDF for the last few years. One tweet that comes to mind where he alluded that just because a building may have a few first aid kits, it's not a hospital.
> You can't blow up entire hospitals and kill patients just because someone's storing stuff in the basement
I believe hospitals lose much of their protection under international law when they’re dual used like this. (There is still proportionality and morality.)
I don't know how much weight the legalist argument holds here, seeing how the IDF has been acting extra-legally for a long while now, but anyway, I seriously doubt that each destroyed hospital and each destroyed school held terrorists. We've seen the IDF target civilians, aid workers and journalists too many times to believe them so easily.
I don’t like it but it was a war. October 7 was a declaration of war. I heard almost no one complain about the “war on terror” and I’m sure similar collateral occurred.
For some reason people forget the pearl harbour event that happened before it all kicked off ?
Not trying to say it’s fine to bomb a hospital, but it doesn’t seem fair to single out the IDF. Do you whine about Hiroshima ?
With a specificity of the number of shots and the spatial reconstruction of the scene, there's some impressive uses of tech to bolster reporting:
>A digital reconstruction of the scene shows that the soldiers would have had an uninterrupted view of the arrival of the convoy.
>The reconstruction was jointly achieved with the two survivors of the incident, with an immersive spatial model they could walk through and amend. Together with spatial and audio analysis we established the position of the soldiers on an elevated ground with an unobstructed line of sight to the emergency vehicles.
Forensic Architecture, the people who did the spatial reconstruction, have been around for a while. You can see more examples of their investigations here: https://forensic-architecture.org/
Forensic Architecture are great. I remember their work being very hot in the international art scene around ~2018 (when they were nominated for the prestigious Turner Prize, among others - https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/turner-prize-2...).
Not sure if they're still fêted as artists or have moved away from that label. I still find their approach completely mesmerizing nevertheless.
Forensic Architecture is a truly remarkable work. If anybody is unfamiliar with Eyal Weizman, I would highly recommend checking out more of his work. Including the 2014 series Rebel Architecture and some of his talks. He recently did a presentation called "Conditions of Life Calculated" at the David Graeber Memorial Lecture at CIIS that I think gives a lot of insight into why the work being done at Forensic Architecture is so remarkable. He also talks about his work with David Wengrow and the Nebelivka Hypothesis based on novel archeology of ancient Ukrainian cities
> case seems pretty clear, especially since the soldiers tried
Even if the 'soldiers' didn't, it wouldn't have mattered as the governing apparatus usually goes out of its way to protect their own militants.
Ex A:
Detainees executed, unarmed civilians killed in their sleep, a child, handcuffed and shot, all covered up by the chain of command – this is the testimony of more than 30 eyewitnesses, former members of UK Special Forces ... Panorama – Special Forces: I Saw War Crimes ... reported a series of cold-blooded murders by UK military personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan over a period of ten years, followed by years of official cover-up.
Yes and no. It does matter because it illustrates both malicious intent and evidence of guilt, as in the guilty party knew they were perpetrating a criminal action.
However, you are also correct, the IDF has little or no accountability for criminal behavior.
> the guilty party knew they were perpetrating a criminal action ... the IDF has little or no accountability for criminal behavior.
May be the brazenness is why they make the best Tech CXOs?
"The Israeli tank commander who has fought in one of the Syrian wars is the best engineering executive in the world. The tank commanders are operationally the best, and are extremely detail oriented. This is based on twenty years of experience — working with them and observing them."
Eric Schmidt (Start-up Nation / Saul Singer et al / pg. 41)
Why have this topic on HN? I mean, search this page for the word "flagged", and while doing that also look at all the grayed-out, downvoted comments that are within an inch of being flagged. Obviously, this is not suitable for HN.
I just wanna say it's nice to see more people finally waking up and smelling the ashes. I can only hope in the future this genocide will be studied to better understand the main points of failure to not repeat such a widely event covered event.
The problem is that both sides lie flagrantly with such frequency that very few claims about the war can be taken at face value.
On the other side there was the famous "hospital bombing" news event early in the war where it was claimed that 500 people were killed, and then within a couple of hours it became obvious that the explosion was caused by a misfiring Hamas rocket, with video from multiple angles of the failure, that it hit an empty parking lot in front of the hospital and only blew out the windows and burnt a few cars, and that no more than a handful of people had been killed.
And also the repeated claims that Israel were lying about the tunnels under Gaza Hospitals, and make videos of one such strike (a bunker buster penetrating the parking lot just outside the entrance) go viral, only for Hamas to later announce that one of the replacement leaders for Sinwar had been killed in that strike, and for excavation to find the bunkers / tunnel network underneath that very hospital.
As well as, earlier in the war, a Hamas bunker w/ data center equipment directly underneath the UNRWA HQ in Gaza.
None of that justifies genuine instances of war crimes and atrocities that Israel may have committed, but there's a reason why people tune out some of the extreme claims that fly around.
But not the video in the OP which demonstrates that the IDF were, in fact firing on aid workers and refugees as they had been accused of, and certainly not the hours of footage of the IDF brazenly taking human shields over the years while insisting they didn't, or the reports of the IDF arming settlers. Curious that you can't enumerate any of these, and you're happy to take at face value a claim the IDF makes but doesn't allow independent third parties to verify (a Hamas bunker w/ data center equipment directly underneath the UNRWA HQ in Gaza) while abjuring such behaviour.
Independent 3rd parties were brought in to verify, though.
I already said I don't condone any instances of legitimate war crimes. I don't think enumerating everything that has ever happened by either side is very useful. But it's a fact that both sides lie flagrantly about atrocities. Lots of the footage in the early days of the war that was claimed to be from Gaza was actually recycled from the Syrian civil war.
If you want me to start listing some BS that Israel has done, fine - the calendar stunt was ridiculous (if you have followed the conflict, you probably have heard of it). What goes on in the west bank is disgraceful. There are plenty of statements by Israeli politicians that are basically genocidal language (though you can play that game with most countries, random US politicians say psychotic shit all the time).
October 7th was genocide, though. You cannot possibly in good faith argue that what Israel is doing is genocide but what Hamas did wasn't.
Also, to be perfectly honest, we've seen 4x as many people killed in Sudan as in Gaza in the same timeframe, including entire cities being wiped out by gunmen filming themselves literally going door to door and shooting people begging for their lives, lying on the ground or in hospital beds. 6,000 people were killed over a single weekend in el-Fasher and barely a peep from the media.
What Israel is doing in Gaza is more similar to what Russia did to Grozny during the 2nd Chechen war than it is to most of the events historically termed "genocides". Which, to be extremely clear, is not at all a sympathetic comparison. The conduct of the Russians was incredibly brutal and disgusting and unjustified (then and now). I would not want to be compared to them.
But, like, you do have to have standards for what words mean. If the low-tech butchers of the RSF have killed hundreds of thousands in the same timeframe, it's not crazy to be more cautious with the "genocide" label.
And one side started it by killing 1,200 civilians and kidnapping 250. Which doesn't justify genocide. But it does factor into the response when one side is governed by a death cult that has no problem letting scores of their own civilians die if it furthers their cause.
It’s strange to me when otherwise intelligent people call this genocide. Genocide is an attempt to exterminate an entire people. Israel is a nuclear armed nation fighting against the equivalent of Dayton, OH.
If genocide were the goal this war would have lasted one day.
Collective punishment, or a long term ethnic cleansing would be much more accurate, but you’re just repeating what you read unthinkingly if you say genocide.
> If genocide were the goal this war would have lasted one day.
You can't infer intent that way. Nuking Gaza isn't free, it would introduce an existential threat to Israel. They are toeing a dangerous line already, and using WMDs would align other countries against them really quickly.
Putin isn't avoiding using nukes on Ukraine because he's a nice guy.
> Earshot used echolocation to analyze the audio on the recordings in order to arrive at precise estimates of the shooters’ locations. Echolocation is the process of locating the source of a sound based on an analysis of the sound’s echoes and the environment in which the sound travels. The Israeli military destroyed and cleared so many buildings in the Tel Al-Sultan area where the ambush of the aid workers took place that very few structures remained. This destruction actually strengthened Earshot’s ability to determine the positions and movements of Israeli soldiers, based on identifying the surfaces responsible for clearly distinguishable gunshot echoes. Rather than having multiple buildings reflecting the sound waves, there were only a few standing walls and the emergency vehicles themselves.
And WW2 only has more journalist deaths because some number of the genocide casualties had been journalists before the Holocaust.
Being a journalist typically provides you some protection in times of war, but for journalists who are part of a group suffering genocide, it's a liability.
From where I sit nobody is questioning that the Israelis are supposed to be the good guys in this story. But the stories coming from the region are horrific! Is it true that it is the official policy of the IDF to shoot to kill children who throw stones at them?
Plus because Israel is making serious efforts to choke off all information from the region, I understand that it takes some time before a sober accounting of an incident like this reaches the outside world. To avoid the charged rhetoric I have waited. Yet the point blank executions of humanitarian workers is still shocking to me. Such reckless hate, it must destroy a person.
Im questioning whether the Israelis are the good guys. Frankly I don’t know how you can look at their history of provocation and unbalanced retaliation and not begin to wonder if maybe they aren’t the good guys
> If this was happening against the west, people would care a lot more
It’s literally happening in Ukraine and, to a lesser scale but precisely the same in type, Minneapolis. On the other hand, there are conflicts across Africa and Asia which are not receiving half the attention.
The problem is majority of Israeli citizens think the government isn't doing enough.
Cue the citizens that protested to stop the aid trucks from going into Gaza. The citizens that protested because the Israeli military arrested (after a lot of international pressure) soldiers that were caught raping Palestinian prisoners. They were protesting for the right of soldiers to continue to rape.
> Earshot used echolocation to analyze the audio on the recordings in order to arrive at precise estimates of the shooters’ locations. Echolocation is the process of locating the source of a sound based on an analysis of the sound’s echoes and the environment in which the sound travels. The Israeli military destroyed and cleared so many buildings in the Tel Al-Sultan area where the ambush of the aid workers took place that very few structures remained. This destruction actually strengthened Earshot’s ability to determine the positions and movements of Israeli soldiers, based on identifying the surfaces responsible for clearly distinguishable gunshot echoes. Rather than having multiple buildings reflecting the sound waves, there were only a few standing walls and the emergency vehicles themselves.
> “Earshot forensically analyzed over 900 gunshots fired at aid workers. It took one whole year of careful listening to reconstruct an auditory picture of what happened that dark night,” Lawrence Abu Hamdan, the director of Earshot, told Drop Site.
I'm not sure how much this was actually necessary to the eventual verdict if this is ever adjudicated, though, if "hiding the evidence" is a factor:
> Following the ambush, Israeli forces crushed all eight vehicles using heavy machinery and attempted to bury them under the sand.
> The body of Anwar al-Attar was found near the ambush site on March 27, and the bodies of the other 14 aid workers, all wearing identifying uniforms or volunteer vests of their respective organizations, were found in a mass grave near the site on March 30.
But the understanding that they were advanced upon in a walking wave of fire, and then the survivors were executed one by one at close range, may help.
Its not automatic due to bot activity. It is from people actively suppressing stories that don't want other people to see.
This is discernible by watching how long it takes stories like these to reach a flagged state on the new submissions page. It is further evident by watching which comments within those submissions get flagged based upon their upvotes and visibility.
Indeed, and try suggesting there should be minimal accountability for flagging[0] and you'll likewise be flagged. Sure maybe the data says there's not some cartel flagging conspiracy but it starts to seem awful suspicious that even reasonable discussion of this misfeature gets flagged.
It's desperation at this point. With each passing day, the truth comes out in clear, non-negotiable detail, and therefore the desperation to hide and/or deflect increases.
You always have plenty of excuses when you get called out. Looking the other way while bot armies mass downvote pro Palestine / anti ICE / anti PayPal mafia content is complicity. I’m sure you have the data to suss out what is obvious to anyone watching these threads in real time.
Think about what you are saying for a moment. Why would "bot armies" come to Hacker News of all places to flag pro-Palestine articles? Don't you think it's a much more reasonable conclusion that people read the site guidelines[1], which clearly say that political posts are off-topic, and then flagged for that reason instead?
There are a million places to discuss politics online. If I wanted to discuss politics, I would go to any one of them. Claiming any HN moderator is 'complicit' in atrocities is absurd.
In 2026 I don't for one second think it organized inauthentic activity is implausible. I think in fact it's probably pretty extensive these days, though I'm not especially sure about penetration of HN in particular. But everything from marketing to state actors to organized political actors to anarchic but politically motivated online groups are mobilized to influence online forums and I think these phenomena are reasonably well characterized by academic research. It can also be people who aren't organized but abuse flagging out of political commitments.
I also don't think your read of it as an organic outcome of a post that obviously violates guidelines is the natural conclusion here, I actually think that interpretation strains credulity more. Where I agree is that I don't think moderators are being heavy-handed on issues like this, but I do think high level political events do merit attention at least once in a while and I don't think the HN pattern has been toward oversaturation.
And in terms of things that make this story unique, I think it's the highest standard of specificity I've ever seen in reporting of this kind, it's using impressive technological reconstruction of the scene, it's actually quite unlike typical news reporting on the topic and it's hosted on a platform that was YC-incubated, and I think DropSite News is in an ascendant moment as a major news breaker. There's lots to talk about here imo.
I mean doesn't your take strain credulity as well? Let's actually think where most discussion happens these days, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, the few remaining newspaper comments sections. I'd struggle to list more off the top of my head.
Why wouldn't influence campaigns, we know every big country to be running, target this site? What reason would they have to leave it out from their list? Why not target a major news forum for the more wealthy and connected (predominantly) Americans in tech? This is not an uwu smol bean site anymore and the cost of (undetectably) botting any given site is rapidly approaching cents.
Mike Huckabee said yesterday that all the land from the Nile to the Euphrates should be taken by Israel. That would involve a cleansing of hundreds of millions of people.
That’s not really what he said.
He immediately qualified it by saying Israel isn’t seeking or asking to take Jordan, Syria, Iraq, etc - they want security and peace in the land they currently hold legitimately.
Did he qualify it by indicating his claim is based on centuries old religious documents that are not agreed to by any majority of the Earth's population?
This is commonly misconstrued as christianity, but in christian tradition it would bring about the coming of the antichrist, massive persecutions globally, and armageddon.
Keep in mind that these powerful men believe that Jewish people coming back to Israel is the first step of the Apocalypse, and the return of Christ. It is a death cult quite literally trying to bring about the end of the world, and they're ruling the world. Also, they are insanely antisemitic and believe most Jews will go to hell.
> Also, they are insanely antisemitic and believe most Jews will go to hell.
A good chunk of them are insanely pro-semitic as well, as they adopt the dual covenant belief that Jews will actually also go to heaven as well as Christians. I've actually never met anyone that adhered to the pro-zionist dispensationalist view that fully thought out the implied consequences, then proceeded to harbor a personal hatred of Jews. The vast majority of them love all things Jewish and hold them in high regard.
In https://hckrnews.com these flagged items appear listed. With https://hckrnews.com as my entry into HN I don't see the need for HackerNewsRemovals other than curiosity to see what is removed.
I'll give you the "party line" (i.e. best-effort understanding of HN-moderators perspective) for why articles like this are frequently flagged:
1) The entire discussion is a rehashing of the exact same points every time the topic is posted, and not very insightful
2) The participation rate for experts (or even authors) in the discussed field/topic is very low (compared to programming topics)
3) The discussion rarely stays civil and requires excessive moderation
An observation (have no verbatim quote, but believe from dang) is that there is a significant base of "anti-political", otherwise "known-good" HN participants, that flag topics like this preemptively pretty much regardless of perspective and exact topic (presumably for above reasons). You can certainly still blame the flagging on bots or Zionists, but it's almost certainly not only those.
You left out the parts about how and when we turn flags off, about how a certain amount of political overlap is both necessary and inevitable, but that it also can't be too much. All of those are important factors, and I've posted many explanations of them:
We can't, however, turn off flags on threads we don't know about. You guys (I don't mean you personally!) unintentionally assume that we're omniscient. We aren't, so we need people to tell us about cases like this.
In this case, no one told us; I ran across it randomly. Randomness is only good for partial results. For reliable message delivery, someone needs to email hn@ycombinator.com, and please remember that it takes time to work through that (er) rather active inbox.
This is such a garbage assessment. I have don't see post of pro-Israel companies and startups that fund/enable this massacre being flagged for political content?
What is this facade of impartialness and too much politics? Tell that to the people massacred.
> there is a significant base of "anti-political", otherwise "known-good" HN participants, that flag topics like this preemptively pretty much regardless of perspective
I'm always sceptical of this given it doesn't happen to similar posts about Iran.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
The forensic reconstruction to this level of detail is novel and interesting, both for the methods deployed and for the likelihood that the half-life of unsolved war crimes appears to be decreasing.
I think it also touches on issues of interest to the hn crowd (it's being reported on a YC-incubated platform!), and one especially unique things about the reporting is the spatial reconstruction of the scene, which is not a degree of detail you typically get, and limits the number of variations of interpretations possible.
I also think issues of censorship are very high on the list of topics of interest on HN and few topics are subject to more extensive censorship than reporting on events in Israel and Palestine.
Israel and Palestine is one of the most obsessively covered topics in every form of western media. All the more the reason it doesn’t belong on HN. I’ll grant that there’s a tech angle to this specific story, but past experience with such articles on HN is that they reliably devolve into endless repetition of fixed talking points on each side. No useful information or opinion is conveyed, just endless insinuation and infective.
Furthermore, there are handful of accounts who sole purpose seems to be to pump the HN feed full of Israel and Palestine. People who want so badly to talk about a single political topic should probably go to Bluesky.
I agree that Bluesky is a great place to go into more depth about it, and in many respects a better place than HN to get good discussion. But I think there's equivocation going on here.
Framing it as "obsessive" is an attempt to shift away from subject matter toward an attitude of journalists or consumers, like it's borne of the same attitude as paparazzi. But I think it merits significant coverage not for that reason, but because it so frequently meets criteria for meriting journalistic attention.
I agree that comment sections can be bad, but they aren't always, and to some degree I would rather trust moderation than suppress reporting on a topic of legitimate interest. You're exactly right that a lot of reaction is toxic and politicized, and sometimes the way that manifests is by trying to cook up rationales to suppress stories by flagging them. Out of respect for the concern you've identified, it would be a huge mistake to let politicization win by allowing politically motivated abuse of flagging.
I think the solution which will lead to the best quality of life for people in and around the levant is a single, secular state. Two states that are both ethnonationalist is unsustainable, and any single state which isn't secular can only be achieved through genocide. Freedom to practice whatever religion, seperation of church and state, and no apartheid for a certain group of people.
If you post like this again we will ban you. There's no place for slurs on this site.
Yes, we apply that equally - I've banned the account that was slurring the opposite group elsewhere in this thread (btw, their comments won't appear to anyone who hasn't turned 'showdead' on in their account). In that case, I didn't post a reply because the account was new and already had a pattern of breaking the site guidelines. In your case, the account is well-established so we wouldn't just go ahead and ban it without replying or warning first.
Dang, I'm writing this reply as a target of antisemitic hate. I am not strictly a Jew (though I am often mistaken for one due to both name and appearance). My relatives were hunted and gassed in WW2.
The poster you are responding to is making ha joke:ish observation (probably badly communicated) that the modus operandi in the Israeli Government is to label all evidence of their crimes "antisemitic" no matter how truthful they are, no matter how many facts, no matter how vile their actions look.
Netanyahu et al have nurtured a context where there is no difference between real antisemitic hate and valid criticism. He and the people like him equate truth to antisemitism. Something which hurts many of us.
We have to be proactive about moderating anti-semitism on HN—which does appear, unfortunately, though of course not in every comment that someone happens to read that way. There is huge variance in how people interpret these things and we do our best to be charitable. (Also, I had better add that we do our best moderate other types of slur in just the same way.)
Let's assume you're correct. Such a point needs to be expressed thoughtfully and substantively, not snarkily in a way that pattern-matches to a slur. This ought to be clear from the site guidelines: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." - "Eschew flamebait." - "Don't be snarky." - [etc.]
It might not be the most substantive comment ever made. But by now it is about as classic as the Stephen Colbert quote ”reality has a well-known liberal bias”, and I bet you would not consider that quote hateful near-bannable offence, versus Republicans, right? It follows the exact pattern, and has a similar connotation. There is a large contingency in power in Israel and the west who loudly considers the truth to be antisemitism. Therefore we have a duty (BECAUSE ALL OTHER WAYS HAVE CLEARLY FAILED) as human beings to mock them. And what better way to mock them (like a court jester) than to use their words against them?
There are others here who would strongly disagree with this view, or the other views expressed on here. Personally, I was startled by the post in question, even as I wondered what was actually meant by it. We all have to coexist on here.
Were you more or less startled by reading it here or hearing those words from the mouth of Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel's Minister of National Security since 2022?
Here's a tip I learned the hard way: you can't assume that other commenters have seen or heard the same things that you have; and when they have, you can't assume that they have the same subset in working memory.
As I mentioned above, I was also startled by that post, because the obvious pattern-match was to something nasty.
No. Your message is. A lot of people commit mortal sin of logical fallacy by extending the responsibility for actions of certain group of people to everyone sharing with them ethnicity or religion. It‘s the stupidity worth of the strongest condemnation given the context.
It‘s not jews committing war crimes in Gaza, it‘s zionists. It‘s not muslims or Palestinians planning and executing terrorist attacks, it‘s religious extremists and far right nationalists. When there will be common understanding of this simple truth, fighting the root causes will be much easier.
Good instinct to fight against antisemitism, because there is a lot of it. Unfortunately the Israeli government lobs accusations of antisemitism at its (legitimate) critics frequently, enough so to muddy the waters between actual antisemitism and criticism of the Israeli state.
Nah, let’s not let them to set the narrative. It is not antisemitism to criticize Israel and I do not care what Israeli or my (German) government says about it.
I disagree that it's ambiguous, and I think how you choose to interpret it comes down to the difference between charitable interpretation and bad faith.
Whether you agree with it or not, does not matter. It is ambiguous due to a simple fact that I did not had the choice of interpretation in my mind. It is how I understood it and it differs from your understanding. The author should have been more clear.
This is 1) extending responsibility for actions of induviduals to everyone sharing with them ethnicity or religion 2) a display of anti-semitic bigotry
Otherwise it, like most tech heavy investigations, showcase how much useful information there is fly around out there in the air just waiting to be hoovered up - and (althought not the case here) YC funded companies happen to be at the frontlines of such work
whether or not you agree that zionism is intrinsically jewish or not, it would serve you to understand that the poster you're arguing against does not believe that zionism is intrinsically jewish, and thus, you're talking past them.
But it's not all zionists committing war crimes in Gaza, it's the IDF. And it's not all IDF members, only some individuals. And its not all of those some individuals, only some of their brain and trigger finger. And it's not all the time, only some of the time.
You are surprisingly right. I know people who served in IDF and would prefer to have nothing in common with those criminals. Generalizing to them would be wrong. It is not voluntary service, different people are required to serve. But people aside, is IDF as institution rotten? It is not generalization to say „yes“, when such things happen. An institution is an entity with the agency to prevent such things and not only did it fail, it covered up. Is Israeli government complicit? Hell, yes, same reason.
There were people in the German army (Wehrmacht) who wanted to have nothing in common with those criminals. Some even tried to kill Hitler and get rid of the regime.
Re the concern about flagging, the situation is much as I've described in these past threads: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... Specifically, when I looked through who had flagged the current post, I saw the usual coalition between users who appear to be consistently flagging for political reasons, and other users who have quite different flagging patterns than that. In any case, virtually all of the accounts that flagged the thread were established HN users.
Sometimes when people bring this concern up, I go through and make a list of other stories that the same accounts had flagged, to illustrate the point that their flags are not exclusively targeting one specific topic or vector. I've done that here in a collapsed reply, if anyone wants to take a look.
I hope this explanation helps - your posts in this thread seemed to me to be in good faith so I wanted to respond in kind. If you still have a question that my comments and links to past explanations haven't answered, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
Here are some stories that flaggers of this submission also flagged. I have no idea why, except for the handful of obvious spam, but it illustrates the point I made in the parent comment.
It seems that people, even "established HN users" will flag literally anything. Do you feel that there is any remaining article quality signal that can be obtained from the current flagging mechanism?
If the above list gives the mistaken impression that flagging is basically random, that's an artifact of the way I cherry-picked the list. The flagging system has problems, for sure, but it's a vital part of how HN's system functions.
If you squint and look closely, though, I think you can detect this in the above list. The weirdest "wtf?" cases of flagging are ones where the threads had a lot of comments and were on the frontpage. That means upvotes won the tug-of-war with flags, as they should have in most of those cases.
Conversely, it you look at the submissions in the list which had 0 comments or very few, it looks to me like most were either spam, low-quality articles, or dupes.
Remember, also, that some flags are just mistakes - the link is easy to fat-finger or misclick, and the UI doesn't provide feedback about that. That's likely to change soon as part of work that tomhow and I are planning.
Funny to see the complaints of this being flagged but no complaints about people posting here flagged. If these aren't going to be open discussions and responses get flagged to invisibility what is the purpose?
There's 4chan but for leftists (leftypol) and there's reddit for leftists (lemmy or raddle). I'd also argue Mastodon is kind of twitter for leftists/hackers
I think The Atlantic is actually pretty close to the mark. Committed, hardcore ideologues frequently turn out to be authoritarian, even if they refer to themselves as "anarchists". Most of these ideologues are busy administering ever more stringent purity tests to anyone they encounter lest someone in their vicinity commit wrongthink.
There is a name for people who build coalitions through compromise and diplomacy, and work towards pragmatic solutions to actual problems — they're called "centrists".
Of course, that's because Qatar actually is an authoritarian state, unlike the US. It hasn't stopped Al-Jazeera from challenging the authority of other nations or claiming that they are authoritarian. Pot, meet kettle and all that.
Oh no, we shouldn't talk about war crimes because the iPhone I'm tapping my words into has some tech from the nation committing those war crimes. I should be more THANKFUL!
Isn't mass murder of civilians the most Israeli thing ever? For those out of the loop, this isn't an anomaly.
It's a societal-level policy: 47% of Israeli Jews want all Palestinians killed; 82% want all Palestinians forcefully expelled (i.e., ethnically cleansed) [0] which would constitute genocide. 56% want the same for all Israeli Arabs.
So, it's pathetic when Westerners act surprised at Israel's antics: you can't support a genocidal state and then be shocked when it does genocidal stuff. This is just Tuesday for them.
Once you understand this, Israel's actions are not an anomaly. It's the natural expression of people who consider their neighbors beneath them, and barely even human.
I wouldn’t point to Epstein, but there is a very powerful lobby that will protect the image of any Israeli government. A lot of Evangelicals also consider Israel important in bringing about the apocalypse, without which they can’t access eternal life. I wish I was kidding on that last one, but there are people actively trying to bring down civilisation so they can go to heaven.
I think when people say "West", they automatically think US and UK - and given their war crimes in recent history, you do get this sentiment, yes. I suspect, however, that this view has exacerbated and now includes other "western" countries that are silent/complicit in current horrific war crimes.
Echolocation based on audio from a cell phone video, with the reports echoing off flat walls in the area, establishes 3D troop movement during the massacre, and the eventual close-range executions. Including of the person whose cell phone it was.
Eyewitness accounts may be dismissed for any number of biases by the motivated reasoner, but echoes are echoes.
There are plenty of people on HN who are active in protecting human rights, and this particular incident is a clear example of the amount of work still left to do in the world by those of us who care about each other more than we cling to national identities - especially those national identities with a long track record of human rights violations.
Hacker News is not solely news about hacking. "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
Not sure how much I'm going to trust this source or report. Seems like there's always a motive behind them, and when counter reports come out actually showing it was Hamas murdering their own citizens again there's no redactions or updates.
> The Israeli military was forced to change its story about the ambush several times, following the discovery of the bodies in a mass grave, along with their flattened vehicles, and the emergence of video and audio recordings taken by the aid workers. An internal military inquiry ultimately did not recommend any criminal action against the army units responsible for the incident.
Unfortunately, the takeaway here will be "be better at destroying the evidence". The video is quite damning against their initial claims; it includes an uninterrupted view of their arrival, in marked emergency vehicles with lights on and uniformed personnel, and the gunfire beginning: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/world/middleeast/gaza-isr...
That's literally the opposite of how the media game around this genocide has played out. And Forensic Architecture has proven to be a reliable source thoughout the conflict.
I remember when folks here were shilling the "Israel promises they'd never bomb a hospital" and "Hamas is lying about the death toll" lines.
All the hospitals are now rubble, and the IDF quietly let it slip that the death toll is legit recently. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2026-01-29/ty-article/.p...
There's damning video of this specific incident, recovered from the dead. I suspect subsequent massacres made a policy of finding and destroying all the phones. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/world/middleeast/gaza-isr...
It's pretty clear that Israel is ethnically cleansing so that they can live in a pure Jewish state.
You know who reminds me of that? Fucking Serbia and they got bombed for it.
You really have no idea what's going on over there, do you?
I don't know why you're using the past tense here, I was still trying to talk some sense into these people barely two days ago. It's hopeless at this point.
If you have 3 hours, there's a documentary you can watch, about a man who was sanctioned by the government to kill a lot of "communists" in 1960's Indonesia: The Act of Killing (available at e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TDeEObjR9Q ).
It's sort of understandable why the defenders of the genocide have to keep defending it. Stopping doing so today would mean admitting that until yesterday you've been defending utter inhumanity.
A review:
> Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing is a challenging documentary. It is not only difficult to watch, but it also probes into one of the most grotesque aspects of human nature: the capacity for self-delusion in the face of horrific atrocities. This isn’t a film about history, facts, or statistics; it’s about the memories of the men who killed, the stories they tell themselves, and how they continue to live with the horrors they’ve inflicted on others. The film’s power lies in its ability to take the viewer beyond a surface-level understanding of evil and into the psychological abyss of those who have committed atrocities—and seemingly moved on with their lives.
From: https://docthisway.com/2024/09/23/the-act-of-killing-review/
It's one of my favourite documentaries, almost as good as The Death of Yugoslavia.
For whatever reason YouTube has put age limits on some of the uploads of it, here's the start of one without it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tj9Zw5fN3rE
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I linked to an article from an Israeli news outlet citing the IDF considering that death toll to be accurate.
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And the IDF?
They're hardly the only ones reporting this.
https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/30/middleeast/israeli-military-g...
> Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth quoted military officials Thursday as saying, “We estimate that about 70,000 Gazans were killed in the war, not including the missing.” Kan 11, the country’s public broadcaster, attributed the information to the Coordinator of Government Affairs in the Territories (COGAT) and said there is now an effort to analyze how many of those killed were civilian or militant.
And the IDF ain't contesting it:
> “The IDF clarifies that the details published do not reflect official IDF data,” the spokesperson said. “Any publication or report on this matter will be released through official and orderly channels.” The spokesperson did not answer if the IDF held data about the number of Palestinians killed in Gaza or if such information would ever be released.
1. Says the IDF accepted the fictitious 0-militants 100%-civilian death toll claim.
2. Links to a news report that has literally no source on its claims. Just says "IDF accepted" and that's it.
3. Links to another news report which does nothing but report on the previous news report as if this makes it credible.
4. Says IDF isn't contesting the report.
5. Proceeds to provide the only official, verifiable, sourced IDF quote about the report, contesting it.
The logical fallacies you're willing to accept in order to feed your hatred is impressive.
1. No, it doesn't.
2. "Kan 11, the country’s public broadcaster, attributed the information to the Coordinator of Government Affairs in the Territories (COGAT)"
(That's a state-owned news outlet, to be clear; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kan_11)
3. See above.
4. Accurate.
5. Re-read that statement. At no point does it contest the toll.
> All the hospitals are now rubble
Hospitals may have been used for retaliation [0], but it is unclear how many & in what capacity (according to accepted conventions, using a hospital to treat wounded combatants wouldn't make it a valid military target, for example; but hiding weapons or personnel would).
[0] One such recent report: https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...
A lot of that ambiguity would vanish if Israel did not have a habit of drastically overstating their case and quietly walking it back after they end up killing more journalists and toddlers than active combatants in hospital bombings. Also if reports didn't deliberately conflate 'armed man' with 'Hamas militant' and euphemize about the 'Hamas-run Interior Ministry' like that one does.
A lot of that ambiguity would vanish if Hamas did not have a habit of not putting uniforms in combat
> Israeli forces dressed in doctors’ scrubs and women’s clothes have killed three Palestinian militants in an undercover operation in a hospital in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/30/israel-forces-...
Hmm.
Do you understand the difference between being not in uniform in order to infiltrate enemy territory and being not in uniform in your own territory?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfidy
> It is prohibited to kill, injure or capture an adversary by resort to perfidy… The following acts are examples of perfidy… The feigning of civilian, non-combatant status...
(Assassinating a paralyzed patient in a hospital is also not typically - ahem - kosher.)
The israelis must stop the occupation regardless of whether the al-Qassam brigades wear uniform or not.
They should also pay reparations, and send their leaders to the Hague.
Not sure I understand the mass downvotes on this one. I didn't take it as endorsing the action but summarizing the rationale.
People have had good reasons for downvoting the above, but it's unclear how many and what those reasons might be.
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It's not at all an uncommon scenario to have to deal with in war, especially asymmetrical conflicts.
IMO, Israel stepped very clearly over the line, repeatedly, in how they handled it, but the parent post is a pretty reasonable summary of the considerations.
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We've banned this account for breaking the site guidelines. You can't attack others like this here, regardless of how right you are or feel you are.
Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The rules aren't written by plucky revolutionaries, but the big powers. They, thus, fairly often favor people who fight like the big powers.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/17/can-hospitals-...
> Article 8 of the Rome statute, which established the international criminal court (ICC) in The Hague, defines a long list of war crimes including “intentionally directing attacks against buildings dedicated to religion, education, art, science or charitable purposes, historic monuments, hospitals and places where the sick and wounded are collected”.
> But it makes an exception if the targets are “military objectives”. Philip-Gay said that “if a civilian hospital is used for acts harmful to the enemy, that is the legal term used”, the hospital can lose its protected status under international law and be considered a legitimate target. Nevertheless, if there is doubt as to whether a hospital is a military objective or being used for acts harmful to the enemy, the presumption, under international humanitarian law, is that it is not.
Again, I think Israel committed war crimes here and throughout Gaza. But the parent poster has a point that using a hospital for combat purposes risks its status.
(There are still rules to follow in that case, that weren't followed. Again, war crimes.)
> Truth: Mass-destroying a country's hospitals, murdering the doctors, nurses, workers & patients, mass-executing aid workers ... is Israeli. And only Israeli.
This is the same mistake many made about Nazi Germany; convincing themselves that the Germans were uniquely evil. It stops people from having to examine themselves.
Steven Sinofsky (ex Microsoft, and was also in the Epstein leaks), has been running cover for the IDF for the last few years. One tweet that comes to mind where he alluded that just because a building may have a few first aid kits, it's not a hospital.
> according to accepted conventions
Who accepted those? And did they have a right to do so on behalf of _all_ of humanity?
The conventions are a guideline. To use them as a blanket moral justification for your actions after the fact is extremely disingenuous.
You mean the hospitals where hamas were storing their weapons and fighters in the big underground tunnels?
Yes. You can't blow up entire hospitals and kill patients just because someone's storing stuff in the basement.
> You can't blow up entire hospitals and kill patients just because someone's storing stuff in the basement
I believe hospitals lose much of their protection under international law when they’re dual used like this. (There is still proportionality and morality.)
"Much of" and "all of" are very different things.
I don't know how much weight the legalist argument holds here, seeing how the IDF has been acting extra-legally for a long while now, but anyway, I seriously doubt that each destroyed hospital and each destroyed school held terrorists. We've seen the IDF target civilians, aid workers and journalists too many times to believe them so easily.
I don’t like it but it was a war. October 7 was a declaration of war. I heard almost no one complain about the “war on terror” and I’m sure similar collateral occurred.
For some reason people forget the pearl harbour event that happened before it all kicked off ?
Not trying to say it’s fine to bomb a hospital, but it doesn’t seem fair to single out the IDF. Do you whine about Hiroshima ?
> I don’t like it but it was a war.
I don't disagree.
There's a reason we have a thing called "war crimes". (In fact, much of the concept stems from a conflict very significant to Israel.)
> I heard almost no one complain about the “war on terror”
I don't think you were listening very ahrd.
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That didn't happen.
And if it did, it wasn't that bad.
And if it was, that's not a big deal.
And if it is, that's not the IDF's fault.
And if it was, they didn't mean it.
And if they did, Gaza deserved it.
That didn't happen.
And if it did, it wasn't that bad.
And if it was, that's not a big deal.
And if it is, it's actually Israel's fault.
And if it was, we didn't mean it.
And if we did, Israelis deserved it.
With a specificity of the number of shots and the spatial reconstruction of the scene, there's some impressive uses of tech to bolster reporting:
>A digital reconstruction of the scene shows that the soldiers would have had an uninterrupted view of the arrival of the convoy.
>The reconstruction was jointly achieved with the two survivors of the incident, with an immersive spatial model they could walk through and amend. Together with spatial and audio analysis we established the position of the soldiers on an elevated ground with an unobstructed line of sight to the emergency vehicles.
Forensic Architecture, the people who did the spatial reconstruction, have been around for a while. You can see more examples of their investigations here: https://forensic-architecture.org/
Forensic Architecture are great. I remember their work being very hot in the international art scene around ~2018 (when they were nominated for the prestigious Turner Prize, among others - https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/turner-prize-2...).
Not sure if they're still fêted as artists or have moved away from that label. I still find their approach completely mesmerizing nevertheless.
What a depressing portfolio...
Their reconstruction of the Beirut Port explosion was incredible though: https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/beirut-port-...
Full report: https://content.forensic-architecture.org/wp-content/uploads...
Forensic Architecture is a truly remarkable work. If anybody is unfamiliar with Eyal Weizman, I would highly recommend checking out more of his work. Including the 2014 series Rebel Architecture and some of his talks. He recently did a presentation called "Conditions of Life Calculated" at the David Graeber Memorial Lecture at CIIS that I think gives a lot of insight into why the work being done at Forensic Architecture is so remarkable. He also talks about his work with David Wengrow and the Nebelivka Hypothesis based on novel archeology of ancient Ukrainian cities
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfD1y7WZLpM
alternative FE: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=bfD1y7WZLpM
This is very thorough. Thanks for the direct link.
The case seems pretty clear, especially since the soldiers tried to hide all evidence.
> case seems pretty clear, especially since the soldiers tried
Even if the 'soldiers' didn't, it wouldn't have mattered as the governing apparatus usually goes out of its way to protect their own militants.
Ex A:
https://www.counterfire.org/article/cold-blooded-murder-and-...Yes and no. It does matter because it illustrates both malicious intent and evidence of guilt, as in the guilty party knew they were perpetrating a criminal action.
However, you are also correct, the IDF has little or no accountability for criminal behavior.
> the guilty party knew they were perpetrating a criminal action ... the IDF has little or no accountability for criminal behavior.
May be the brazenness is why they make the best Tech CXOs?
The tank commanders of another, bygone war also had the reputation for attention to detail. Funny how history rhymes.
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> The Israeli soldiers remained on the sandbank while firing continuously at the aid workers for four minutes.
Damn…
The IDF are terrorists and war criminals.
Hamas ? All good?
Why have this topic on HN? I mean, search this page for the word "flagged", and while doing that also look at all the grayed-out, downvoted comments that are within an inch of being flagged. Obviously, this is not suitable for HN.
I just wanna say it's nice to see more people finally waking up and smelling the ashes. I can only hope in the future this genocide will be studied to better understand the main points of failure to not repeat such a widely event covered event.
It's gonna happen again and again and again until the end of humanity.
The problem is that both sides lie flagrantly with such frequency that very few claims about the war can be taken at face value.
On the other side there was the famous "hospital bombing" news event early in the war where it was claimed that 500 people were killed, and then within a couple of hours it became obvious that the explosion was caused by a misfiring Hamas rocket, with video from multiple angles of the failure, that it hit an empty parking lot in front of the hospital and only blew out the windows and burnt a few cars, and that no more than a handful of people had been killed.
And also the repeated claims that Israel were lying about the tunnels under Gaza Hospitals, and make videos of one such strike (a bunker buster penetrating the parking lot just outside the entrance) go viral, only for Hamas to later announce that one of the replacement leaders for Sinwar had been killed in that strike, and for excavation to find the bunkers / tunnel network underneath that very hospital.
As well as, earlier in the war, a Hamas bunker w/ data center equipment directly underneath the UNRWA HQ in Gaza.
None of that justifies genuine instances of war crimes and atrocities that Israel may have committed, but there's a reason why people tune out some of the extreme claims that fly around.
But not the video in the OP which demonstrates that the IDF were, in fact firing on aid workers and refugees as they had been accused of, and certainly not the hours of footage of the IDF brazenly taking human shields over the years while insisting they didn't, or the reports of the IDF arming settlers. Curious that you can't enumerate any of these, and you're happy to take at face value a claim the IDF makes but doesn't allow independent third parties to verify (a Hamas bunker w/ data center equipment directly underneath the UNRWA HQ in Gaza) while abjuring such behaviour.
Independent 3rd parties were brought in to verify, though.
I already said I don't condone any instances of legitimate war crimes. I don't think enumerating everything that has ever happened by either side is very useful. But it's a fact that both sides lie flagrantly about atrocities. Lots of the footage in the early days of the war that was claimed to be from Gaza was actually recycled from the Syrian civil war.
If you want me to start listing some BS that Israel has done, fine - the calendar stunt was ridiculous (if you have followed the conflict, you probably have heard of it). What goes on in the west bank is disgraceful. There are plenty of statements by Israeli politicians that are basically genocidal language (though you can play that game with most countries, random US politicians say psychotic shit all the time).
Can you link to those reports?
> problem is that both sides lie flagrantly
And yet one side is committing genocide.
October 7th was genocide, though. You cannot possibly in good faith argue that what Israel is doing is genocide but what Hamas did wasn't.
Also, to be perfectly honest, we've seen 4x as many people killed in Sudan as in Gaza in the same timeframe, including entire cities being wiped out by gunmen filming themselves literally going door to door and shooting people begging for their lives, lying on the ground or in hospital beds. 6,000 people were killed over a single weekend in el-Fasher and barely a peep from the media.
What Israel is doing in Gaza is more similar to what Russia did to Grozny during the 2nd Chechen war than it is to most of the events historically termed "genocides". Which, to be extremely clear, is not at all a sympathetic comparison. The conduct of the Russians was incredibly brutal and disgusting and unjustified (then and now). I would not want to be compared to them.
But, like, you do have to have standards for what words mean. If the low-tech butchers of the RSF have killed hundreds of thousands in the same timeframe, it's not crazy to be more cautious with the "genocide" label.
And one side started it by killing 1,200 civilians and kidnapping 250. Which doesn't justify genocide. But it does factor into the response when one side is governed by a death cult that has no problem letting scores of their own civilians die if it furthers their cause.
Oh, I didn’t know that the whole conflict started on October 6th.
One side is governed by a death cult for sure, if you look at how many children they indiscriminately kill.
It’s strange to me when otherwise intelligent people call this genocide. Genocide is an attempt to exterminate an entire people. Israel is a nuclear armed nation fighting against the equivalent of Dayton, OH.
If genocide were the goal this war would have lasted one day.
Collective punishment, or a long term ethnic cleansing would be much more accurate, but you’re just repeating what you read unthinkingly if you say genocide.
How is long term ethnic cleansing different from genocide?
> If genocide were the goal this war would have lasted one day.
You can't infer intent that way. Nuking Gaza isn't free, it would introduce an existential threat to Israel. They are toeing a dangerous line already, and using WMDs would align other countries against them really quickly.
Putin isn't avoiding using nukes on Ukraine because he's a nice guy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_humanitarian_and_human...
And this is relevant for HN, because?
> Earshot used echolocation to analyze the audio on the recordings in order to arrive at precise estimates of the shooters’ locations. Echolocation is the process of locating the source of a sound based on an analysis of the sound’s echoes and the environment in which the sound travels. The Israeli military destroyed and cleared so many buildings in the Tel Al-Sultan area where the ambush of the aid workers took place that very few structures remained. This destruction actually strengthened Earshot’s ability to determine the positions and movements of Israeli soldiers, based on identifying the surfaces responsible for clearly distinguishable gunshot echoes. Rather than having multiple buildings reflecting the sound waves, there were only a few standing walls and the emergency vehicles themselves.
Seems like interesting tech.
There's plenty of live footage of IDF forces targeting international aid workers and journalists.
"fun" fact: more journalists died in the Gaza than in every conflict since ww2 combined.
And WW2 only has more journalist deaths because some number of the genocide casualties had been journalists before the Holocaust.
Being a journalist typically provides you some protection in times of war, but for journalists who are part of a group suffering genocide, it's a liability.
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From where I sit nobody is questioning that the Israelis are supposed to be the good guys in this story. But the stories coming from the region are horrific! Is it true that it is the official policy of the IDF to shoot to kill children who throw stones at them?
Plus because Israel is making serious efforts to choke off all information from the region, I understand that it takes some time before a sober accounting of an incident like this reaches the outside world. To avoid the charged rhetoric I have waited. Yet the point blank executions of humanitarian workers is still shocking to me. Such reckless hate, it must destroy a person.
Im questioning whether the Israelis are the good guys. Frankly I don’t know how you can look at their history of provocation and unbalanced retaliation and not begin to wonder if maybe they aren’t the good guys
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Here are 512 vietnamese journalists killed in the Vietnam war.
https://vietnamnews.vn/society/1719668/one-war-journalist-s-...
At this time, not everybody had a phone and 100 followers so Journalists were rarer.
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The slaughter of journalists is documented throughout modern history - by the very people those journalists worked for.
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If this was happening against the west, people would care a lot more. Unfortunately, nothing seems to be happening to Israel.
> If this was happening against the west, people would care a lot more
It’s literally happening in Ukraine and, to a lesser scale but precisely the same in type, Minneapolis. On the other hand, there are conflicts across Africa and Asia which are not receiving half the attention.
> On the other hand, there are conflicts across Africa and Asia which are not receiving half the attention.
Because the West doesn't fund and shield the perpetrators unlike Israel.
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Disgusted by this, I hope that the good people of Israel realize what their hideous regime is doing and stop it. I know for sure that
The problem is majority of Israeli citizens think the government isn't doing enough.
Cue the citizens that protested to stop the aid trucks from going into Gaza. The citizens that protested because the Israeli military arrested (after a lot of international pressure) soldiers that were caught raping Palestinian prisoners. They were protesting for the right of soldiers to continue to rape.
Only 5% of Israelis believe that IDF used too much violence in Gaza..
Damn, the IDF got this guy mid-sentence...
WHAT DOES HE KNOW FOR SURE???
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Why was this flagged? Automatically / without review? This is a novel tech story, albeit one without a lot of technical detail.
https://www.earshot.ngo/what-we-do/audio-ballistics
https://forensic-architecture.org/
https://content.forensic-architecture.org/wp-content/uploads...
> Earshot used echolocation to analyze the audio on the recordings in order to arrive at precise estimates of the shooters’ locations. Echolocation is the process of locating the source of a sound based on an analysis of the sound’s echoes and the environment in which the sound travels. The Israeli military destroyed and cleared so many buildings in the Tel Al-Sultan area where the ambush of the aid workers took place that very few structures remained. This destruction actually strengthened Earshot’s ability to determine the positions and movements of Israeli soldiers, based on identifying the surfaces responsible for clearly distinguishable gunshot echoes. Rather than having multiple buildings reflecting the sound waves, there were only a few standing walls and the emergency vehicles themselves.
> “Earshot forensically analyzed over 900 gunshots fired at aid workers. It took one whole year of careful listening to reconstruct an auditory picture of what happened that dark night,” Lawrence Abu Hamdan, the director of Earshot, told Drop Site.
I'm not sure how much this was actually necessary to the eventual verdict if this is ever adjudicated, though, if "hiding the evidence" is a factor:
> Following the ambush, Israeli forces crushed all eight vehicles using heavy machinery and attempted to bury them under the sand.
> The body of Anwar al-Attar was found near the ambush site on March 27, and the bodies of the other 14 aid workers, all wearing identifying uniforms or volunteer vests of their respective organizations, were found in a mass grave near the site on March 30.
But the understanding that they were advanced upon in a walking wave of fire, and then the survivors were executed one by one at close range, may help.
I didn’t flag. But the top comments are nothing to do with the tech, and aren’t dissimilar from any Gaza War commentary online.
Any posts linked to the IDF committing crimes are automatically flagged on this site (and others). Many bots are at play here.
Its not automatic due to bot activity. It is from people actively suppressing stories that don't want other people to see.
This is discernible by watching how long it takes stories like these to reach a flagged state on the new submissions page. It is further evident by watching which comments within those submissions get flagged based upon their upvotes and visibility.
> on the new submissions page
What if they only act once it reaches the front page?
Indeed, and try suggesting there should be minimal accountability for flagging[0] and you'll likewise be flagged. Sure maybe the data says there's not some cartel flagging conspiracy but it starts to seem awful suspicious that even reasonable discussion of this misfeature gets flagged.
0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44962005
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=flags%20off%20turn%20by%3Adang...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47141443
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11 minutes and you’re almost totally grayed out. Wild that they think this type of suppression isn’t blatantly obvious to anyone with a brain.
It's desperation at this point. With each passing day, the truth comes out in clear, non-negotiable detail, and therefore the desperation to hide and/or deflect increases.
You always have plenty of excuses when you get called out. Looking the other way while bot armies mass downvote pro Palestine / anti ICE / anti PayPal mafia content is complicity. I’m sure you have the data to suss out what is obvious to anyone watching these threads in real time.
Think about what you are saying for a moment. Why would "bot armies" come to Hacker News of all places to flag pro-Palestine articles? Don't you think it's a much more reasonable conclusion that people read the site guidelines[1], which clearly say that political posts are off-topic, and then flagged for that reason instead?
There are a million places to discuss politics online. If I wanted to discuss politics, I would go to any one of them. Claiming any HN moderator is 'complicit' in atrocities is absurd.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Why would "bot armies" come to Hacker News of all places to flag pro-Palestine articles?
Turn on showdead and you'll find much, much weirder wastes of time here.
In 2026 I don't for one second think it organized inauthentic activity is implausible. I think in fact it's probably pretty extensive these days, though I'm not especially sure about penetration of HN in particular. But everything from marketing to state actors to organized political actors to anarchic but politically motivated online groups are mobilized to influence online forums and I think these phenomena are reasonably well characterized by academic research. It can also be people who aren't organized but abuse flagging out of political commitments.
I also don't think your read of it as an organic outcome of a post that obviously violates guidelines is the natural conclusion here, I actually think that interpretation strains credulity more. Where I agree is that I don't think moderators are being heavy-handed on issues like this, but I do think high level political events do merit attention at least once in a while and I don't think the HN pattern has been toward oversaturation.
And in terms of things that make this story unique, I think it's the highest standard of specificity I've ever seen in reporting of this kind, it's using impressive technological reconstruction of the scene, it's actually quite unlike typical news reporting on the topic and it's hosted on a platform that was YC-incubated, and I think DropSite News is in an ascendant moment as a major news breaker. There's lots to talk about here imo.
I mean doesn't your take strain credulity as well? Let's actually think where most discussion happens these days, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, the few remaining newspaper comments sections. I'd struggle to list more off the top of my head.
Why wouldn't influence campaigns, we know every big country to be running, target this site? What reason would they have to leave it out from their list? Why not target a major news forum for the more wealthy and connected (predominantly) Americans in tech? This is not an uwu smol bean site anymore and the cost of (undetectably) botting any given site is rapidly approaching cents.
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Mike Huckabee said yesterday that all the land from the Nile to the Euphrates should be taken by Israel. That would involve a cleansing of hundreds of millions of people.
That’s not really what he said. He immediately qualified it by saying Israel isn’t seeking or asking to take Jordan, Syria, Iraq, etc - they want security and peace in the land they currently hold legitimately.
If they're not seeking to take it, then why are Zionist settlers currently crossing into Syria and taking it?
> He immediately qualified it
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Schrodingers...
> He immediately qualified it
Did he qualify it by indicating his claim is based on centuries old religious documents that are not agreed to by any majority of the Earth's population?
Huckabee is a Christian Zionist.
I'm sure he sees the death and displacement of millions as a small price to pay to bring about the Rapture in his lifetime.
This is commonly misconstrued as christianity, but in christian tradition it would bring about the coming of the antichrist, massive persecutions globally, and armageddon.
Keep in mind that these powerful men believe that Jewish people coming back to Israel is the first step of the Apocalypse, and the return of Christ. It is a death cult quite literally trying to bring about the end of the world, and they're ruling the world. Also, they are insanely antisemitic and believe most Jews will go to hell.
https://religiondispatches.org/2025/12/04/mike-huckabee-trie...
> Also, they are insanely antisemitic and believe most Jews will go to hell.
A good chunk of them are insanely pro-semitic as well, as they adopt the dual covenant belief that Jews will actually also go to heaven as well as Christians. I've actually never met anyone that adhered to the pro-zionist dispensationalist view that fully thought out the implied consequences, then proceeded to harbor a personal hatred of Jews. The vast majority of them love all things Jewish and hold them in high regard.
I reached this post via https://github.com/vitoplantamura/HackerNewsRemovals
I recommend any hackernews users to check that site frequently, plenty of interesting posts on hackernews that get flagged and hidden daily.
They also appear on https://hn.algolia.com/
In https://hckrnews.com these flagged items appear listed. With https://hckrnews.com as my entry into HN I don't see the need for HackerNewsRemovals other than curiosity to see what is removed.
why is this flagged ?
I'll give you the "party line" (i.e. best-effort understanding of HN-moderators perspective) for why articles like this are frequently flagged:
1) The entire discussion is a rehashing of the exact same points every time the topic is posted, and not very insightful
2) The participation rate for experts (or even authors) in the discussed field/topic is very low (compared to programming topics)
3) The discussion rarely stays civil and requires excessive moderation
An observation (have no verbatim quote, but believe from dang) is that there is a significant base of "anti-political", otherwise "known-good" HN participants, that flag topics like this preemptively pretty much regardless of perspective and exact topic (presumably for above reasons). You can certainly still blame the flagging on bots or Zionists, but it's almost certainly not only those.
You left out the parts about how and when we turn flags off, about how a certain amount of political overlap is both necessary and inevitable, but that it also can't be too much. All of those are important factors, and I've posted many explanations of them:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=flags%20off%20turn%20by%3Adang...
We can't, however, turn off flags on threads we don't know about. You guys (I don't mean you personally!) unintentionally assume that we're omniscient. We aren't, so we need people to tell us about cases like this.
In this case, no one told us; I ran across it randomly. Randomness is only good for partial results. For reliable message delivery, someone needs to email hn@ycombinator.com, and please remember that it takes time to work through that (er) rather active inbox.
I literally can’t say anything pro humanity without it being flagged even if it hints negativity towards Israel.
Can you remember any pro-Israeli posts you turned flags off for since the October 7 attack?
Can you point to any pro-Israeli posts on HN since October 7, flagged or not?
They don’t get flagged though.
Yes they are, just like the comment you answered to will.
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This is such a garbage assessment. I have don't see post of pro-Israel companies and startups that fund/enable this massacre being flagged for political content?
What is this facade of impartialness and too much politics? Tell that to the people massacred.
> there is a significant base of "anti-political", otherwise "known-good" HN participants, that flag topics like this preemptively pretty much regardless of perspective
I'm always sceptical of this given it doesn't happen to similar posts about Iran.
What are you talking about? Iran topics get flagged at least as often as Gaza (in proportion to the amount to posts on the topic).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46599742
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46849715
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46553599
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46839106
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46754132
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46624529
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The forensic reconstruction to this level of detail is novel and interesting, both for the methods deployed and for the likelihood that the half-life of unsolved war crimes appears to be decreasing.
This is most certainly not something that is covered on TV news. Seems on topic to me.
I think it also touches on issues of interest to the hn crowd (it's being reported on a YC-incubated platform!), and one especially unique things about the reporting is the spatial reconstruction of the scene, which is not a degree of detail you typically get, and limits the number of variations of interpretations possible.
I also think issues of censorship are very high on the list of topics of interest on HN and few topics are subject to more extensive censorship than reporting on events in Israel and Palestine.
Israel and Palestine is one of the most obsessively covered topics in every form of western media. All the more the reason it doesn’t belong on HN. I’ll grant that there’s a tech angle to this specific story, but past experience with such articles on HN is that they reliably devolve into endless repetition of fixed talking points on each side. No useful information or opinion is conveyed, just endless insinuation and infective.
Furthermore, there are handful of accounts who sole purpose seems to be to pump the HN feed full of Israel and Palestine. People who want so badly to talk about a single political topic should probably go to Bluesky.
I agree that Bluesky is a great place to go into more depth about it, and in many respects a better place than HN to get good discussion. But I think there's equivocation going on here.
Framing it as "obsessive" is an attempt to shift away from subject matter toward an attitude of journalists or consumers, like it's borne of the same attitude as paparazzi. But I think it merits significant coverage not for that reason, but because it so frequently meets criteria for meriting journalistic attention.
I agree that comment sections can be bad, but they aren't always, and to some degree I would rather trust moderation than suppress reporting on a topic of legitimate interest. You're exactly right that a lot of reaction is toxic and politicized, and sometimes the way that manifests is by trying to cook up rationales to suppress stories by flagging them. Out of respect for the concern you've identified, it would be a huge mistake to let politicization win by allowing politically motivated abuse of flagging.
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I think the solution which will lead to the best quality of life for people in and around the levant is a single, secular state. Two states that are both ethnonationalist is unsustainable, and any single state which isn't secular can only be achieved through genocide. Freedom to practice whatever religion, seperation of church and state, and no apartheid for a certain group of people.
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Edit: if https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47136856 is correct and you did not intend that as a slur (edit 2: which having seen https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47137004 is now clearer to me), it would be good to read some of these comments about intent vs. effects, and adjust how you post in the future:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
--- original reply ---
If you post like this again we will ban you. There's no place for slurs on this site.
Yes, we apply that equally - I've banned the account that was slurring the opposite group elsewhere in this thread (btw, their comments won't appear to anyone who hasn't turned 'showdead' on in their account). In that case, I didn't post a reply because the account was new and already had a pattern of breaking the site guidelines. In your case, the account is well-established so we wouldn't just go ahead and ban it without replying or warning first.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Dang, I'm writing this reply as a target of antisemitic hate. I am not strictly a Jew (though I am often mistaken for one due to both name and appearance). My relatives were hunted and gassed in WW2.
The poster you are responding to is making ha joke:ish observation (probably badly communicated) that the modus operandi in the Israeli Government is to label all evidence of their crimes "antisemitic" no matter how truthful they are, no matter how many facts, no matter how vile their actions look.
Netanyahu et al have nurtured a context where there is no difference between real antisemitic hate and valid criticism. He and the people like him equate truth to antisemitism. Something which hurts many of us.
Please understand this.
That was not at all obvious from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47136682 alone, which gave me quite a jolt.
We have to be proactive about moderating anti-semitism on HN—which does appear, unfortunately, though of course not in every comment that someone happens to read that way. There is huge variance in how people interpret these things and we do our best to be charitable. (Also, I had better add that we do our best moderate other types of slur in just the same way.)
Let's assume you're correct. Such a point needs to be expressed thoughtfully and substantively, not snarkily in a way that pattern-matches to a slur. This ought to be clear from the site guidelines: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." - "Eschew flamebait." - "Don't be snarky." - [etc.]
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It might not be the most substantive comment ever made. But by now it is about as classic as the Stephen Colbert quote ”reality has a well-known liberal bias”, and I bet you would not consider that quote hateful near-bannable offence, versus Republicans, right? It follows the exact pattern, and has a similar connotation. There is a large contingency in power in Israel and the west who loudly considers the truth to be antisemitism. Therefore we have a duty (BECAUSE ALL OTHER WAYS HAVE CLEARLY FAILED) as human beings to mock them. And what better way to mock them (like a court jester) than to use their words against them?
There are others here who would strongly disagree with this view, or the other views expressed on here. Personally, I was startled by the post in question, even as I wondered what was actually meant by it. We all have to coexist on here.
Were you more or less startled by reading it here or hearing those words from the mouth of Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel's Minister of National Security since 2022?
Here's a tip I learned the hard way: you can't assume that other commenters have seen or heard the same things that you have; and when they have, you can't assume that they have the same subset in working memory.
As I mentioned above, I was also startled by that post, because the obvious pattern-match was to something nasty.
Sorry, didn’t know that was your alt account.
No. Your message is. A lot of people commit mortal sin of logical fallacy by extending the responsibility for actions of certain group of people to everyone sharing with them ethnicity or religion. It‘s the stupidity worth of the strongest condemnation given the context.
It‘s not jews committing war crimes in Gaza, it‘s zionists. It‘s not muslims or Palestinians planning and executing terrorist attacks, it‘s religious extremists and far right nationalists. When there will be common understanding of this simple truth, fighting the root causes will be much easier.
I think GP was making a joke - since zionists claim any anti-zionist behavior is anti-semitic.
Then I apologize without retraction.
Good instinct to fight against antisemitism, because there is a lot of it. Unfortunately the Israeli government lobs accusations of antisemitism at its (legitimate) critics frequently, enough so to muddy the waters between actual antisemitism and criticism of the Israeli state.
Nah, let’s not let them to set the narrative. It is not antisemitism to criticize Israel and I do not care what Israeli or my (German) government says about it.
Yep. It's used as a shield for the worst humanity has to offer.
Their message didn't make any of the extrapolations that you're suggesting and I don't think that the post itself does that either.
The message is ambiguous. It can be interpreted the way I read it.
I disagree that it's ambiguous, and I think how you choose to interpret it comes down to the difference between charitable interpretation and bad faith.
Whether you agree with it or not, does not matter. It is ambiguous due to a simple fact that I did not had the choice of interpretation in my mind. It is how I understood it and it differs from your understanding. The author should have been more clear.
> why is this flagged ?
Because flaggers deem it to be anti-semitic
> committing war crimes in Gaza, it‘s zionists
This is 1) extending responsibility for actions of induviduals to everyone sharing with them ethnicity or religion 2) a display of anti-semitic bigotry
Otherwise it, like most tech heavy investigations, showcase how much useful information there is fly around out there in the air just waiting to be hoovered up - and (althought not the case here) YC funded companies happen to be at the frontlines of such work
Zionism isn't an ethnicity or a religion.
whether or not you agree that zionism is intrinsically jewish or not, it would serve you to understand that the poster you're arguing against does not believe that zionism is intrinsically jewish, and thus, you're talking past them.
But it's not all zionists committing war crimes in Gaza, it's the IDF. And it's not all IDF members, only some individuals. And its not all of those some individuals, only some of their brain and trigger finger. And it's not all the time, only some of the time.
We mustn't generalize.
You are surprisingly right. I know people who served in IDF and would prefer to have nothing in common with those criminals. Generalizing to them would be wrong. It is not voluntary service, different people are required to serve. But people aside, is IDF as institution rotten? It is not generalization to say „yes“, when such things happen. An institution is an entity with the agency to prevent such things and not only did it fail, it covered up. Is Israeli government complicit? Hell, yes, same reason.
There were people in the German army (Wehrmacht) who wanted to have nothing in common with those criminals. Some even tried to kill Hitler and get rid of the regime.
Not the majority though, else the wehrmacht would have done less war crimes.
I think this depends on whether you draw the boundary at "refuses to do X even when killed for it" or "wouldn't have done X on their own".
IDF is an army of Israel, not some unknown militant group.
Israel is a state, as they call "democratic", which elected officials who have control to stop these crimes, but not stopping deliberately.
I believe religion is a reasonable extension. Some of them explicitly call for murdering unbelievers.
it‘s „some“, not „all“. Religious extremism by definition.
I was talking about religions, not individuals.
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@dang any explanation for this being flagged?
Am I still allowed to ask why the moderators don't want people to read and discuss this particular technology story?
(@dang doesn't work. I only saw this randomly.)
Your question is answered here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47141443, but the short version is that your assumption that we see everything is incorrect.
I also would appreciate knowing if the mods see this. I'm worried that flagging is possibly automated and vulnerable to campaigning.
We eventually saw it, but only randomly.
In case you didn't see them yet, here are some of my other comments in this thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47141443
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47141678
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47141517
Re the concern about flagging, the situation is much as I've described in these past threads: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... Specifically, when I looked through who had flagged the current post, I saw the usual coalition between users who appear to be consistently flagging for political reasons, and other users who have quite different flagging patterns than that. In any case, virtually all of the accounts that flagged the thread were established HN users.
Sometimes when people bring this concern up, I go through and make a list of other stories that the same accounts had flagged, to illustrate the point that their flags are not exclusively targeting one specific topic or vector. I've done that here in a collapsed reply, if anyone wants to take a look.
I hope this explanation helps - your posts in this thread seemed to me to be in good faith so I wanted to respond in kind. If you still have a question that my comments and links to past explanations haven't answered, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
Here are some stories that flaggers of this submission also flagged. I have no idea why, except for the handful of obvious spam, but it illustrates the point I made in the parent comment.
The rise and fall of peer review - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47123133 - Feb 2026 (0 comments)
Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47120899 - Feb 2026 (692 comments)
Pope tells priests to use their brains, not AI, to write homilies - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47119210 - Feb 2026 (440 comments)
Music Discovery - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47114672 - Feb 2026 (56 comments)
The 7-Year Bug That Took 3 Minutes to Fix - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47090261 - Feb 2026 (1 comment)
AI made coding more enjoyable - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47075400 - Feb 2026 (97 comments)
RFC 3092 – Etymology of “Foo” (2001) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46934499 - Feb 2026 (52 comments)
Launching My Side Project as a Solo Dev: The Walkthrough - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46845567 - Feb 2026 (9 comments)
There is an AI code review bubble - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46766961 - Jan 2026 (249 comments)
Proof of Corn - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46735511 - Jan 2026 (307 comments)
XLibre XServer 25.1 Changes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46474846 - Jan 2026 (4 comments)
Python Data Science Handbook - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46120611 - Dec 2025 (61 comments)
NTSB Preliminary Report – UPS Boeing MD-11F Crash [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45995834 - Nov 2025 (228 comments)
Best shipping logistic aggregator in India - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45924139 - Nov 2025 (0 comments)
WebDAV isn't dead yet - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45698070 - Oct 2025 (128 comments)
Unicode Footguns in Python - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45689443 - Oct 2025 (20 comments)
AGI is not imminent, and LLMs are not the royal road to getting there - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45627171 - Oct 2025 (124 comments)
Super Ace: Your PH Home for Jili Slots and a 300% Welcome Bonus - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45624939 - Oct 2025 (0 comments)
Pkgbase Removes FreeBSD Base System Feature - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44730021 - July 2025 (42 comments)
As always, thanks for the transparency.
It seems that people, even "established HN users" will flag literally anything. Do you feel that there is any remaining article quality signal that can be obtained from the current flagging mechanism?
If the above list gives the mistaken impression that flagging is basically random, that's an artifact of the way I cherry-picked the list. The flagging system has problems, for sure, but it's a vital part of how HN's system functions.
If you squint and look closely, though, I think you can detect this in the above list. The weirdest "wtf?" cases of flagging are ones where the threads had a lot of comments and were on the frontpage. That means upvotes won the tug-of-war with flags, as they should have in most of those cases.
Conversely, it you look at the submissions in the list which had 0 comments or very few, it looks to me like most were either spam, low-quality articles, or dupes.
Remember, also, that some flags are just mistakes - the link is easy to fat-finger or misclick, and the UI doesn't provide feedback about that. That's likely to change soon as part of work that tomhow and I are planning.
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Funny to see the complaints of this being flagged but no complaints about people posting here flagged. If these aren't going to be open discussions and responses get flagged to invisibility what is the purpose?
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Real shame this got flagged so quickly, too. This is prime HN material.
Isn't this a tech news site?
Did you click on the link? It's a pretty amazing technological investigation.
Even just technologically it's more interesting than 90% of the stuff posted here.
this is prime material for HN to flag...
Is there an HN but for anarchists? Or maybe just anti-authoritarians?
There's 4chan but for leftists (leftypol) and there's reddit for leftists (lemmy or raddle). I'd also argue Mastodon is kind of twitter for leftists/hackers
The Atlantic? I kid. I really mean Al-Jazeera.
I think The Atlantic is actually pretty close to the mark. Committed, hardcore ideologues frequently turn out to be authoritarian, even if they refer to themselves as "anarchists". Most of these ideologues are busy administering ever more stringent purity tests to anyone they encounter lest someone in their vicinity commit wrongthink.
There is a name for people who build coalitions through compromise and diplomacy, and work towards pragmatic solutions to actual problems — they're called "centrists".
There are no anti-authoritarian news outlets in Qatar, for obvious reasons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_Qatar
Of course, that's because Qatar actually is an authoritarian state, unlike the US. It hasn't stopped Al-Jazeera from challenging the authority of other nations or claiming that they are authoritarian. Pot, meet kettle and all that.
No, its not. And I gladly flagged it.
Redirects set to: talk.politics.misc.
> No, it’s not. And I gladly flagged it. > Redirects set to: talk.politics.misc.
So you don’t think anyone should discuss topics that touch on politics, including this war, on HN?
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Oh no, we shouldn't talk about war crimes because the iPhone I'm tapping my words into has some tech from the nation committing those war crimes. I should be more THANKFUL!
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Isn't mass murder of civilians the most Israeli thing ever? For those out of the loop, this isn't an anomaly.
It's a societal-level policy: 47% of Israeli Jews want all Palestinians killed; 82% want all Palestinians forcefully expelled (i.e., ethnically cleansed) [0] which would constitute genocide. 56% want the same for all Israeli Arabs.
So, it's pathetic when Westerners act surprised at Israel's antics: you can't support a genocidal state and then be shocked when it does genocidal stuff. This is just Tuesday for them.
Once you understand this, Israel's actions are not an anomaly. It's the natural expression of people who consider their neighbors beneath them, and barely even human.
[0]: https://www.genocidewatch.com/single-post/poll-show-most-jew...
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I do like to set a personal moral standard a little higher than "what would Hamas endorse?"
Things are in terrible state in the world.
Gaza exposed it even more:
* No one accepts high western "morality" anymore
* Most US politicians are blackmailed via Epstein who worked for Israel, with high probability, including Trump
* ICE is just the beginning, they're trained by IDF, send more people and 1940 is not too far away from us
>Most US politicians are blackmailed via Epstein
??? Most? His network was certainly extensive but "most politicians" seems like a significantly overextended extrapolation.
I wouldn’t point to Epstein, but there is a very powerful lobby that will protect the image of any Israeli government. A lot of Evangelicals also consider Israel important in bringing about the apocalypse, without which they can’t access eternal life. I wish I was kidding on that last one, but there are people actively trying to bring down civilisation so they can go to heaven.
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Not Israel, but Russia - good old KGB honeytrap.
> * No one accepts high western "morality" anymore
Is that an accurate trend on an individual basis?
I think when people say "West", they automatically think US and UK - and given their war crimes in recent history, you do get this sentiment, yes. I suspect, however, that this view has exacerbated and now includes other "western" countries that are silent/complicit in current horrific war crimes.
Travel to Middle East, some parts of Africa and China, ask what people think. Most say have similar opinion that west is not "morally" superior.
South America as well, in particular with regard to the US. Too many coups and sponsorship of military dictatorships will do that.
Travel to anywhere, anywhere at all, ask people if they consider themselves morally superior ...
Well, in this case, they are correct
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Indeed. Vouched but it won't last for long.
As shablulman's inexplicably dead post says, this is very impressive work analyzing this unquestionable war crime.
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=flags%20off%20turn%20by%3Adang...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47141443
Shablulman is shadowbanned.
Cause their post sounds like some AI wrote it, and I guess everyone else noticed, too.
shablu shouldn't sounds like a LLM (no, i didn't flag or downvote it)
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Echolocation based on audio from a cell phone video, with the reports echoing off flat walls in the area, establishes 3D troop movement during the massacre, and the eventual close-range executions. Including of the person whose cell phone it was.
Eyewitness accounts may be dismissed for any number of biases by the motivated reasoner, but echoes are echoes.
There are plenty of people on HN who are active in protecting human rights, and this particular incident is a clear example of the amount of work still left to do in the world by those of us who care about each other more than we cling to national identities - especially those national identities with a long track record of human rights violations.
Hacker News is not solely news about hacking. "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
you cannot be serious. wtf?
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Not sure how much I'm going to trust this source or report. Seems like there's always a motive behind them, and when counter reports come out actually showing it was Hamas murdering their own citizens again there's no redactions or updates.
Oh, come on.
> The Israeli military was forced to change its story about the ambush several times, following the discovery of the bodies in a mass grave, along with their flattened vehicles, and the emergence of video and audio recordings taken by the aid workers. An internal military inquiry ultimately did not recommend any criminal action against the army units responsible for the incident.
Unfortunately, the takeaway here will be "be better at destroying the evidence". The video is quite damning against their initial claims; it includes an uninterrupted view of their arrival, in marked emergency vehicles with lights on and uniformed personnel, and the gunfire beginning: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/world/middleeast/gaza-isr...
That's literally the opposite of how the media game around this genocide has played out. And Forensic Architecture has proven to be a reliable source thoughout the conflict.
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Please don't cross into personal attack, no matter how wrong someone else is or you feel they are.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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